Thursday, June 12, 2014

REPUBLICAN, JOE SCARBOROUGH, AND HIGHER EDUCATION

Republicans voted down legislation designed to help students go to college proving that the duplicity of the #Republican Party knows no end. This morning the usually sickening +Joe Scarborough (MSNBC) was especially disgusting. The subject of the discussion was Senate failure to pass the student loan refinance act, which would allow students, who are drowning in debt, to lower significantly their student loans debt. The vote, although a majority, was not enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. Scarborough, after proclaiming that he was upset that the bill failed to pass, offered his analysis.

This is the Republican Party line, hence his line; they constantly promote themselves by saying they support equal opportunity for all including public education, that is K-12 education. They do not. We in North Carolina know that; they cut the education budget drastically—elementary teachers are leaving our state in droves. However, it is not just North Carolina; Republicans around the nation are passing voucher programs and starting charter schools with the idea of replacing public schools with private schools poor families cannot afford. It is not just K-12 education but includes all state universities—read public universities as distinct from private colleges. Although they have essentially done it the same as they have done with public schools, it is a little more complicated because of research. Let me explain how they done it starting out with Joe’s political philosophy. 

Joe Scarborough started out by proclaiming how upset he was with the Senate for not passing the Elizabeth Warren bill to allow students to refinance their student loans. He is proud to be a “small” government conservative, which puts him in the cut taxes category, which is something everyone endorses, which he thinks makes him one of us; by the way the TEA party name is the acronym for taxed enough already. In other words, he started his discourse by endorsing Grover Norquist’s cutting taxes agenda to starve the government. He, along with most of us, is always proclaiming the government is too big, costly, and cumbersome. I have blogged before concerning the illogic reasoning involved, conflict really, before. The people—“we the people”—want the government to do many good things but “we” do not want to pay for them. Constitutional fundamentalists base their argument on this premise; the only thing the government should do is support and army—period. They, including Joe, literally “hate” public health care, environmental protection, public education, social services of any kind, and a long, long list of etceteras. That is socialism, or to Koch brothers, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio it is communism. This conflict is what Joe, along with his simplistic Republican friends, cannot understand.

I consider (most) Republican live in a simplistic yes or no, black and white world. They seem not to be capable of understanding that life is not like that; it is complex. You cannot have, for example, affordable health care in a free enterprise economy—everyone knows free market health care failed miserable yet Republicans hate the Affordable Health Care act. You cannot have a free enterprise economy without regulations yet they are always calling for deregulation; if you have three business people in a group, they will work in collusion to cheat their customers even if it deals with life’s essentials such as food or housing. Or, if you are a #John McCain, you cannot understand why we can not go around the world bombing everyone who does not agree with the Untied States and be called a man of peace. Finely, you cannot have equality and justice for all in education unless you have public education and you cannot have public education unless you are willing to pay for the children of poor families to go to schools and universities as good as those for rich families. This premise is what we built this country on. For example, this was not happening in even in public schools, which was the basis for introducing the controversial “common core curriculum”. That is elementary education but there is higher education as well. I have been writing and arguing about what is happening in universities for over 40 years (University-Industrial Complex: The Erosion of Undergraduate Higher Education; Amazon.com). Thus, the failure of the Elizabeth Warren legislation opened up an old wound for me.

Republicans with the help of Democrats have cut taxes to the bone. States’ support for universities has dried up because there is no tax money to support them; because state legislatures no longer have money to fund state universities, they force university professors to solicit grant money for patentable research to the benefit of industry. Republican even passed legislation (Bayh-Dole Act: 1980) to allow government money for secret industrial research project by allowing professors to patent results. Professors are greedy just as anyone else and they will lie, cheat, and steal for profit. If you  do not think this is a problem, ask yourself, why are there more professors and service personal hired by universities than there are students in those universities. Like three business people, professors, industrialist, and professors work in collusions and devote all their time to “for profit research” and not teaching.

More and more professors support themselves with grant money; 25%, 50%, and even 100%. The University of Minnesota is a prime example of such a corrupt university administration—can you imagine a university president demanding that teaching professors to gain tenure must demonstrate entrepreneurship; it is an abomination. Industrialist, that is Republicans, applauded long time Cornell University president Frank H. T. Rhodes who wrote “Creation of the Future: The Role of the American Universities” and said that industrials should have a say about which professors is hired and given tenure. Applaud; hell, he should have bee shot.

This brings us full circle: Republicans cut taxes so much that states cannot support universities and greedy industrialist add to the problem by diverting as many tax dollars as possible in to their own pockets by shutting down their research laboratories and having professors do research in universities. The only thing source left for starving universities is student tuition—university presidents raise tuition to the point where college is not affordable for anyone but the very rich: fifty and sixty thousand a year tuition.

Joe Scarborough tells us Republicans are doing everything they can to support education because they stand for equal opportunity and things constitutional. What do the American people do? They believe them. Pollsters tell us that “we” are going to vote in a Republican majority into the Senate to cut taxes because taxes are too high.

Somehow, all of this makes sense to the warped Republican mind. There is no way a working person’s family can afford a higher education putting an end of the American dream. The people thought they found a way of supporting students by making loans affordable. However, if students borrow money they have to pay interests that are higher then they can possible afford, which puts a stop to that solution. Did I mention that Elizabeth Warren’s legislation proposed to cut tax loopholes on industries to pay for the government loans, which is precisely why Republicans voted it down?  The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, the guy who directed the filibuster of the legislation, claimed it was a democratic trick to raise taxes. He was right! The American people want to live the American dream; while Republicans are doing everything, they can to destroy that dream. You are hurting yourself to help them do it; because you like guns, or think abortion is wrong, or are a raciest and believe some black guy is setting on his backsides collecting tax dollar, or some welfare queen receives food stamps, or some illegal alien is getting free healthcare. Maybe you have an evangelical preachers tell you the only way to live is under biblical law.  Maybe, you just hate Obama but really do not know why. Regardless, the consequences are that your children are not being educated.




URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated

No comments:

Post a Comment